Playing Action Video Games May Be Bad For Your Brain, Study Finds (www.cbc.ca)

An anonymous reader shares a report:Playing first-person shooter video games causes some users to lose grey matter in a part of their brain associated with the memory of past events and experiences, a new study by two Montreal researchers concludes. Gregory West, an associate professor of psychology at the Universite de Montreal, says the neuroimaging study, published Tuesday in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, is the first to find conclusive evidence of grey matter loss in a key part of the brain as a direct result of computer interaction. "A few studies have been published that show video games could have a positive impact on the brain, namely positive associations between action video games, first-person shooter games, and visual attention and motor control skills," West told CBC News. To date, no one has shown that human-computer interactions could have negative impacts on the brain -- in this case the hippocampal memory system." The four-year study by West and Veronique Bohbot, an associate professor of psychiatry at McGill University, looked at the impact of action video games on the hippocampus, the part of the brain that plays a critical role in spatial memory and the ability to recollect past events and experiences.

Comments

Bad or evolution?

[dbrueck]

Grey matter loss seems bad, but at the same time I wonder if we're just detecting humans adapting to technology - maybe it's not so much a net loss in brain functionality but more a manifestation of tradeoffs being made.

For example, growing up there was a lot of emphasis on memorizing information (memorize all the countries of the world, memorize all US states and their capitals, memorize these dates in history, memorize these mathematical equations, etc.). These days that seems far less useful.

So, if we offload to technology the storage and recall of trivia, it wouldn't be surprising to find that some part of our brains are less used compared with those of people 50 years ago. But maybe we'd also see that the brains of people today are better at being exposed to more data without being overwhelmed, or better at quickly sifting through mounds of information to find something in particular, or better at distilling lots of info down to its essence.